Hopefully this weekend is starting well for everyone.

Make sure you take time to reset and recharge!

Today’s excerpt from the book, Crucial Conversations, focuses on the importance of recognizing our role in these conversations.

This is the first principle of dialogue – Start with Heart.
That is, your own heart.
If you can’t get yourself right, you’ll have a hard time getting dialogue right.
When conversations become crucial, you’ll resort to the forms of communication that you’ve grown up with – debate, silent treatment, manipulation, and so on.

The first problem we face in our crucial conversations is not that our behavior degenerates.
It’s that our motives do – a fact that we usually miss.
So the first step to achieving the results we really want is to fix the problem of believing that others are the source of all that ails us.
Those who are best at dialogue tend to turn this logic around.
They believe the best way to work on “us” is to start with “me”.

More often than not, we do something to contribute to the problems we’re experiencing.
People who are best at dialogue understand this simple fact and turn it into the principle “Work on me first, us second.”
They realize not only that they are likely to benefit by improving their own approach, but also that they’re the only person they can work on anyway.
As much as others may need to change, or we may want them to change, the only person who can continually inspire, prod, and shape – with any degree of success – is the person in the mirror.

~Evolution of Self
#Weekendword #crucialconversations #startwithheart #startwithme